Kolkata | 22nd November 2019: For boutique and small chain of hotel owners, the surest way of accelerating revenue and sales is to by putting an end to their dependence on online travel aggregators and offline travel agents, where the commission goes up to 30%. With the ever increasing number of travellers constantly seeking out the convenience of online hotel booking, the need of having an independent and integrated booking system for the small hotels can no longer be ignored.
Bookingjini is a SaaS based platform empowering hotels to generate direct bookings from their websites. Headquartered in Bhubaneshwar, with offices at Gurgaon and Bangalore, Bookingjini uses marketing automation and experience engine to help hoteliers maximize their revenue from online direct booking and reduce cost of acquisition.
“With technology like cloud computing, machine learning, deep tech, block chain etc, a hotel entrepreneur can be technologically equipped and capable to take over the booking of its own property without third-party dependency. Furthermore with the most powerful device in hand, the Smartphone, anything is achievable”, believes Sibasish Mishra, the owner of Bookingjini.
Sibasish completed his Business school from XIMB and worked for a financial service company in Mumbai for 10 years before setting up his own business in Bangalore.
Speaking of his business Sibasish says, “A person who is able to send a message over WhatsApp or post on social media will be the sole owner of his property without relying on online or offline agents. A Smartphone will be the only hardware requirement. We want to make the technology used by the Hiltons and Marriotts of the world, accessible and affordable to the boutique and small chain hotel-owners by activating online bookings from the hotel’s website & inventory management.”
In January, 2018 Bookingjini was incubated by Neotec Hub, a business incubation centre located in Kolkata set up by the Ambuja Neotia Group, offering an intense and customised incubation course to Startups operating mostly in the domains of Healthcare, Education, Hospitality and Real Estate and has 25 Startups in the present Cohort.
“Neotec Hub happened at the right time. As a Startup there are many aspects of business we tend to miss out on, like financial compliance, legal compliance, governance etc. At Neotec Hub we were supported by their seasoned board of mentors, legal team, finance team and got direct access to Ambuja Neotia’s existing hotel business to get the pilot done and test the untested dynamics of the business.”
“I remember when I spoke to Parthiv Neotia, Director of Neotec Hub, about our need of funds and that we were ready to scale, he took no time in putting his team into understanding our requirements and reached out to his network to create access for our business. They also deployed PWC to create finance modelling for us. In four months time we got our business plan along with the scale up story ready”, adds Sibasish elaborating on Neotec Hub’s role in the growth of his business.
Recently Bookingjini has raised a collective seed funding of 3 crores from Mumbai Angels Network, India’s premier platform for venture investing. The deal was led by Apurva Salarpuria, Director – Salarpuria Group.
Commenting on their recent accomplishment, Co-founder Sibasish Mishra said, “The commitment of Neotec Hub in our journey is evident from the fact that immediately after the successful funding round, they have put us in the Enhance Program which is focused in helping us to utilize the funds for an exponential revenue growth by next year.”
